Recent graduate and latest member of the Wide Sky Design team Kate Mason is to have her work featured in the Service Design Fringe Festival this weekend. The featured work will be three films she produced during her final year at Goldsmiths University. The films are part of a project she has titled “foraged narratives”.
They aim to be an exploration of foraging as a design process, they take objects found on daily expeditions and discuss and share the narratives surrounding them through personification.
After finding and forming narratives around the objects, she would then create costumes and performances to be enacted at the scene of discovery for other people to find and experience – turning everyday happenings into spectacle. These performances were recorded and converted into the following films:
The golden balloon Is a discussion about conflict of ego, using the balloons plastic materiality and gold appearance as a physical representation of the internal conflict she experienced in the moment of discovery. The desire to take it as her own and then the realisation of the taking of the balloon being an egotistical action to perform as it derives from the balloon being a giant golden initial of her own name.
The Marmite Toast Rack Is a discussion around the self-criticism formed when falsely assuming negative intentions, and the sometimes beautiful reality that is often missed or misinterpreted.The unassumed nature of the marmite toast rack is one of love and a catalyst of community and sharing. However, this is disguised by the assumption that it is a symbol of wealth due to its dispensable and seemingly commodified nature.
The Childs Sketchbook Is about a torn up and abandoned child’s sketchbook found on a busy main road consisting of residential and commercial buildings. The narrative that was formed from this was the representation of childhood to adulthood progression and the correlation of this theme with the two contrasting forms of architecture.
“This year, our focus is on service design in times of uncertainty. From planet-centric design to future-proof business, we’re on a mission to provoke your thoughts.”
With the ever prominent growing industrialisation of our planet the Foraged Narratives project exhibits the impact these changes have on one of our most basic human functions and activities.
Most of us no longer spend our days foraging for food to survive, but when we try to re-enact this process in more industrially developed environments the outcomes and processes change completely. It is the result of foraging in these times of change and uncertainty that this project attempts to explore and exhibit. As a critical design piece, it predicts, as the industrialised world grows, perhaps it will become conceivable that the only things left to forage will be the narratives we leave behind in the form of objects.
